Since I never eat anything in bed and since I knew I did not have any popcorn before I went to bed, I had no idea why my bed looked like the floor of a movie theater cineplex.

“Did you have popcorn in bed last night?” I asked my husband.

He gave me that look he always gives me when I ask him something inane.

“Nope,” he responded.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure I did not have any popcorn in bed last night,” he affirmed assuredly, as though giving testimony in court. “I did not have any Twizzlers either.”

“Well, there’s popcorn in the bed and I know I didn’t have any and you say you didn’t have any, so where did it come from?” I wondered, cross-questioning the witness. I held out a couple of slightly squashed popcorn kernels as evidence.

“Maybe someone else was sleeping in our bed and eating popcorn?” he replied.

“Who? You mean like Goldilocks?” I wondered.

“Actually, I was thinking more like one of our kids.”

I shook my head. The kids went to sleep before we did so I knew it wasn’t them. One of us — my husband or I — was the culprit. There was definitely a popcorn-eating bed offender in our midst, and he needed to be brought to justice, preferably before the next laundry day.

Like any good popcorn sleuth, I decided I needed to find some clues. I left the room and followed a trail of popcorn leading from our bedroom, down the stairs and into the kitchen. On the kitchen counter was an empty bag of microwave popcorn and beside it a bowl of unpopped kernels. I snorted in disdain. Whoever the criminal was, he clearly wasn’t very good about covering his tracks.

The trail of popcorn continued into the family room and onto the couch. I glanced at the dog asleep on the floor and wondered if it was possible that he was the culprit. But since he couldn’t reach the microwave and the lack of opposable thumbs would prevent him from even opening the bag, I concluded that the dog didn’t do it.

Of course, it was conceivable that an intruder had entered the house and made the popcorn. But that didn’t explain how the popcorn had gotten into our bed. Being fairly certain that the only ones in the bed the night before were my husband and me, I rejected the intruder idea.

“OK, I’m stumped,” I admitted to my husband as I returned to the scene of the crime. “I have no idea how the popcorn got in the bed.”

Page 2 of 2 - He thought for a minute.

“Is it possible,” he wondered, “that you were sleep snacking?”

“Huh?”

“Sleep snacking. Some people talk in their sleep. Some people walk in their sleep. Maybe you snack on popcorn in your sleep,” he postulated.

“That is utterly impossible,” I protested.

“Why is it impossible?”

“Because,” I replied, “if I’m going to sleep snack, it’s going to be on chocolate.”

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